Our Work

Injury Prevention

How Safe Alaskans works to reduce preventable injuries across ages.

In 2018, our organization changed its name to the Center for Safe Alaskans to better encompass these three core purposes to our organization: preventing injuries, promoting wellbeing, and improving safety.

Preventing Injuries

Preventing injuries in Alaska has been Safe Alaskans’ mission since its incorporation almost 20 years ago, as the Alaska Injury Prevention Center. Our organization has worked hard towards that purpose. As we’ve worked to reduce injuries, we’ve joined the rest of world along the way in combining injury prevention with safety promotion. Traditional injury prevention involves creating a safer physical environment, utilizing fear of enforcement to prompt safe behavior and providing education, with the belief that if people know what they should do to be safe, they will do it. While this sometimes works, it is not a cure all.

Promoting Wellbeing

Wellbeing is the “achievement of good and satisfactory existence as defined by the individual”. Some of the factors that contribute to wellbeing include supportive relationships, risk management to protect individuals and promote personal safety, feeling secure, happiness and health. People who experience a sense of wellbeing also have optimism, well developed social and emotional skills, and engage in healthier and safer lifestyles.

Improving Safety

Safety promotion adds the science of what it takes to decrease unsafe behaviors and to increase the adoption of safe ones. In many ways, this is more complicated than passing legislation to get people to wear seatbelts and threaten to ticket unbelted passenger. This is the science behind what motivates change in a way that is sustainable, and not dependent on maintaining a perception of a high level of enforcement.

Programs